I’m hoping for some help with a conundrum I have. Some third party opinions would be greatly appreciated.

I am currently torn between two devices which have both recently been reviewed. They are the new 13” Macbook Pro with Retina and the 13” Macbook Air.

I’m looking at the 1.7GHz Air and the 2.4GHz Pro both with 8gig of RAM and 128 Gig SSDs. (£1149 and £1179 respectively)

What I’m interested in knowing is:

1. Which one will perform best? I use Handbrake, iPhoto, shed loads of media, surf the web a lot and play a little Minecraft.2. Do the Iris graphics make any difference over the HD 5000?3. Do I really need a retina display? Or does it have a negative effect when gaming due to the resolution increase?

I've also compaired both devices on geekbench and was surprised the Air came out on top. But does this mean it will also out perform the Pro for my purposes?

The MacBook Pro is certainly faster. The MacBook Pro line is designed for maximum performance, while the MacBook Air line is designed for maximum portability. The MacBook Air line uses ULV CPUs, while the MacBook Pro line uses full mobile CPUs, so trying to compare their clock speeds is like comparing apples and oranges (no pun intended).

My non-scientific perception of people's opinion about retina displays is that people who have never owned one usually say, "Do I really need one?" but once they have owned one, they are practically unwilling to buy anything else.

I though that might be case but I'm still bemused as to how the i7 out strips the i5 on geekbench. Also from the video review it seemed the Air handled Diablo better. Maybe once we get the frame rates we can compare them in a more real way.